From blank page to campaign plan: Using the campAIgnR AI tool to scaffold public communication campaign design
Ralf Schmälzle, Sue Lim · Communication Teacher · 2025
Writing campaign proposals is a cornerstone of strategic communication education but often presents a hurdle for students. This article describes campAIgnR, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to cowrite proposals for public communication campaigns about health-related topics used in an undergraduate class. We detail the tool’s integration into the course. Our results suggest campAIgnR provides a scaffold for the process of campaign design, reduces student stress, and provides new learning experiences in the domain of AI. It frees students to focus less on the more mechanical aspects of basic drafting and more on higher-order ideational tasks. This shift not only makes the process more engaging and enjoyable but also fosters more thoughtful and effective campaign proposals, all while developing crucial prompt engineering skills for the twenty-first-century communication workforce.Course Public Communication Campaigns—Design and Analysis.Objectives Students learn AI-augmented campaign design. They develop strategic communication and health communication expertise as well as prompt-engineering skills. They also learn to critically evaluate and refine AI-generated content to meet campaign objectives and standards.